Beginning with a quote from the Beatles ("Got to be good-looking 'cause he's so hard to see"), Overbye reports that the artist Shea Hembrey has created a collection of paintings and sculptures that he (Hembrey, not Overbye) calls "a collective meditation on the unseen structure of our universe."

"The show features black holes--including one that looks like a bottomless bird's nest of meticulously glued straw--and metaphorical models of the cosmos elegantly assembled from burnt cork, moonstones, guinea feathers, and a sheet of lead inscribed with intricate cosmic doodles," Overbye writes. And this:

Mr. Hembrey likes to refer to an old Russian description of darkness as “so filled with something that there is no room for light,” or, in the words of the Latvian writer Anita Vanaga, “darkness as inpenetrable multitude that blots out the light.”

Dark matter now apparently belongs to all of us, scientist, citizen, and artist alike. It has, as a metaphor, "escaped its astronomical origins," Overbye writes.